ABSTRACT
During the 1970s and early 1980s, film theory (and film culture) constituted a kind of Self, assimilating other intellectual trends for its own growth. Quite predictably, an impasse for film theory and film history soon resulted, since words and concepts like “voyeurism,” “scopophilia,” “economy,” “power,” “commodification,” “male hysteria” and “the Classical Hollywood Cinema” constructed yet new versions of the Fall. This chapter considers some analogies from the geography of the world, which is of course really no different from the geography of the imagination. Only with the geography of the imagination is it possible to have the luxury of imagining this time and space in which an authentic Other might exist. Things change but the language still belongs to the geography of the imagination—the names are rhetorical before they are anything else. “Latin” or “Hispanic” American writers can rhetorically invoke a Latin or Hispanic cultural essence as an offensive/defensive frontier against Anglo cultural hegemony here in California.
